Implement blue

Artist

Margaret Preston

About

She feels that this is a mechanical age - a scientific one - highly civilised and unaesthetic. She knows that the time has come to express her surroundings in her work. All around her in the simple domestic life is machinery - patent ice-chests that need no ice, machinery does it; irons heated by invisible heat; washing up machines; electric sweepers, and so on. They all surround her and influence her mind …

Margaret Preston, 1927

'Implement blue' is one of Margaret Preston's most innovative works, embodying the values of progressive, modern living. Its restricted palette and strict analysis of form exemplify Preston's quest to isolate and resolve pictorial problems within the still-life genre. The domestic vessels have been renamed 'implements' and reduced to essential forms.